


and i say to my heart: rave on

by hitlikehammers



Series: Cardiophilia Sequence [11]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Cardiophilia, Established Relationship, Happy Ending, Heartbeat Kink, Human Anatomy, Life-Affirming Sex, Love, M/M, Pulsepoint Kink, Reichenbach Fix-It, Reichenbach Redux, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:28:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1486420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Always, <i>always</i>: Sherlock will rewrite the cosmos for John Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and i say to my heart: rave on

**Author's Note:**

> Exists within the same 'verse as **[suddenly your heart showed me my way](http://archiveofourown.org/works/411375)** , **[the beat and beating heart](http://archiveofourown.org/works/422019/chapters/704161)** , **[your heart in the lightning (and the thunder that follows)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/446596)** , **[echoes through the caverns of a chest (the give and take)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/450331)** , **[i'd trade your fading heart (for the flailing beats in mine)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/461462/chapters/795460)** , **[i am tired, beloved (of chafing my heart against the want of you)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/523584/chapters/926410)** , **[all the jagged edges (of the broken heart made whole)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/547533/chapters/974935)** , **[within the beating, blessed (aching, rising; hand in hand)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/681182)** , **[oh heart, you wicked saint](http://archiveofourown.org/works/714391)** , and **[oh, heart (i would not dangle you down into the sorry places)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1439296)**. It is a direct sequel to **[oh, heart (i would not dangle you down into the sorry places)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1439296)** , but it stands on its own as some life-affirming sex if you're not keen on thinking about Reichenbach in this context.
> 
>  
> 
> As per usual, my love and thanks to **[speak_me_fair](http://speak-me-fair.livejournal.com)** for looking this over.
> 
> Credit to [Mary Oliver](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807068977?ie=UTF8&tag=jourthrogrie-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0807068977) for the title.

Forty-five thousand, seven hundred and twenty-six. 

The seconds. 

The seconds that pass between the instances of John in his arms—too many, too long.

Sixty-eight thousand, four hundred and twenty-five.

The beats.

The beats that torment, that torture, the eternal fibrillation: when John meets his eyes, when John turns away, when John is a touch away, a breath, a room: too much, but there. There. _Alive_. Still breathing.

The beating: for John, he suspects, it comes in different ebbs, different flows, but amounts to near the same, becomes the same.

And Sherlock: of all the things of which Sherlock is certain, this rhythm, this beloved hum—this is one thing that he _knows_.

The minutes, the hours: the day as it’s spread out from the impact, from those moments on the pavement to those moments in the morgue: the blur of it is hazy, is opaque even in Sherlock’s mind, the silhouette of it a mere hint, seen through the glass not darkly but with an anxiousness, a sinister intent.

For every moment John exists beyond the reach of him, outside his immediate sphere—too far to breathe him in and _know_ —Sherlock’s chest goes tight, his head grows faint.

The saferoom—at least twelve floors beneath ground level, airtight, breachless—is dark; cold. It is their last stop: Mycroft will mobilise the necessary assets, will devise the necessary cover, and in due course, they’ll move to strike in concert, to dismantle the Network with as swift and complete a strike as they can muster. Until then, precautions are necessary.

Until then, there is John. 

And after.

After, there will also be John.

Sherlock’s heart pounds for the promise of it, for the proximity of the soul of him, of John’s living, breathing body, and for all that lies ahead unknown, this is real.

John’s hands are upon him as the lock snicks, sealing them inside.

“You bastard,” John gasps, clenches fists in Sherlock’s shirt, his grip tight enough, nails close enough to pull, to tear as he wrenches Sherlock closer, impossibly closer so that the frantic heave of his chest is a constant pressure, a formulating bruise against Sherlock’s skin as they breathe, breathe, breathe: “ _God_.” 

John’s lips are on him, frenzied and almost violent, almost vengeful save for the way they _need_

“You fucking _bastard_ ,” John sobs into him, into his mouth as they kiss, as they seek to _consume_ —as their hands press and lilt and grasp only to slip and hold anew, John’s fingers at the pulse in his neck and the pulse at his wrist, John’s teeth around the swell of his lip measuring the unthinkable surge of his blood because this: this is the reason for all that falls forth in the tears on John’s cheeks, the why.

For John.

Always, _always_ , Sherlock will rewrite the cosmos for John Watson.

And what John laments was a magic trick, a moment. What John lashes out on behalf of was not a heartbeat lost, or gained. This was not the pulse he can taste, salty and hot and fluid on the underside of John’s tongue, the ranging pump of blood and feeling he can parse inside the chest against his own: sacrosanct.

What John hurts for was _nothing_ , compared to what could have been.

And yet Sherlock: Sherlock bleeds for the grief in John’s eyes, the tang of John’s sorrow on his lips, the pounding of John’s heartbreak like agony lanced with every beat.

Sherlock feels the ache in every cell and neurone, every hard-won breath that comes, a blessing, from the man he’s hurt, the man he’ll hurt again to _keep_. 

“John,” Sherlock pants, and the name breaks where the want, the _need_ never will, never could, and it’s heavy, still, the threat of what was almost taken, what was nearly lost, all for Sherlock’s stupidity, all for where he falls perpetually short. “John, please—”

“Shh,” John whispers into the thrum of Sherlock’s pulse, sucking the point of greatest force, greatest strength with a force of his own. “Shhh, just,” and it ruins Sherlock, twists his veins until the blood won’t go; the way his neck, the collar of his shirt grows damp as John chokes: “Let me.”

And when John’s words, his plea deigns to catch, to rasp, Sherlock cannot help the resonation where it settles in the chambers, rattles in the interventricular septum at the opposite frequency it trills across the interatrial: cataclysmic, threatening to flay him open, to tear upon dual axes and leave his heart to spill from the tatters.

When John’s words are said, a moan against Sherlock’s skin, he gives.

He can do no less.

In truth, it’s cathartic, it’s exquisite, it is all that it ever is and was and promised to be forevermore from the first, to the last: it is everything but there is something beyond quantification, there is something immense and unbidden, unknown and unhinged that surges in Sherlock’s veins and settles in the small places, the subtle structures of his flailing heart: coats the musculi pectinati and seeps to line the crista terminalis so that every drop, every molecule of blood that passes through him sings, cries of John, John, _John_ as the man himself sucks down Sherlock’s neck and tongues in time with that wild drumming, gasps broken against the beat until the brokenness subsides, is made whole in common time, _prestissimo_ ; _brillante_ —and it’s only as John’s tears dry, as John’s breath steadies and his touch smoothes, his lips go plush where desperation had claimed an edge: it’s only as John sinks into him that the structures vibrating against pericardial walls start to falter, that the will that propelled against logic this far starts to flag, starts to give, starts to wither toward an end.

Because it’s only as John’s hands are undoing his shirt, as John’s touch is gentle, needing: it’s as John is irrefutably _John_ against his skin that reality crashes, that the need to _know_ John’s presence, John’s being, John’s flesh and blood and bone for all that it was almost gone.

It’s only as John’s open mouth is held against his own pounding heart that Sherlock starts to tremble in time with the pulsing there, starts to succumb, and he needs, he needs, oh _god_ —

“Sherlock?” John asks against him, and when Sherlock’s eyes find his, as John draws back until only his lower lip is caught against Sherlock’s chest, framing the visible stretch of the ventricle below where it swells at the surface, wet from John’s mouth: when Sherlock’s eyes find John’s, Sherlock crumbles; comes apart.

“He was going to,” Sherlock gasps, the cracks in him growing with every half-heaved breath: he was going to stop him, stop John Watson, stop his heart, _burn the heart_ —

“He, they,” Sherlock wrenches out, excoriating; “You...” and Sherlock’s lungs contract with greater force, somehow, than his wild heart, and he cannot breathe, he cannot think, not like this, not with every horrifying possibility blinding him to what _is_ —

“ _Please_ ,” he moans, wretched, and John knows.

He _knows_.

So when Sherlock’s fingers tug not sensuous, but desperate at the waist of John’s jeans; when Sherlock’s hands curl around the flesh of John’s thighs, thumbs lined against the femoral artery so as to tap asynchronic, pulse against pulse—when Sherlock grips him and pulls, John lifts, practised, wraps his legs around Sherlock’s hips as Sherlock lifts him, pressed against the wall as Sherlock presses against him in kind: chest aligned to Sherlock’s head, Sherlock’s mouth, Sherlock’s ear, and the sound of John’s blood, the turbulence resounding as with every atrioventricular, every semilunar snap of the valves is revelatory and unprecedented, still, and Sherlock strains to discern, to dissect every percussive groan of the muscles, the tendinous strings that draw at the cusps, the leaves to contract in perfect time, again and again and again, follows the pattern of John’s melodic, delirious respiration to predict the intrathoracic diminishing, the pressure relieved and the split that resonates in Sherlock’s ribs, only mended when the tone, when the beating reconciles, pumps constant and soothing and rampant and true against Sherlock’s lips, against Sherlock’s cheek as he shivers, as he leans in closer, closer: _needing_ , so much more than words.

“Venae cavae,” Sherlock mouths to the frantic surge at the apex, insistent behind John’s ribs, and he needs John to understand: needs John to understand why Sherlock could not leave him, never leave him, needs John to understand that while Sherlock’s heart belongs to John, as John’s belongs to him, the fact remains that the heart in Sherlock’s chest is beyond his capacity to endure, to nurture and hold on his own—it’s too heavy, it’s too vast, now, and he will fail it, he will fail John if he is left to make it pump, to make it gasp alone.

The heart in him is John’s, against all logic: it belongs to John, it is John’s to keep and it is therefore more precious than any part of Sherlock that belongs disparately to himself, and yet, without John, without his very reason for _being_ , he stumbles, he plummets—and should the dire reality emerge that between the two of them, only one can continue to breathe, there is no question, there is no debate.

There is a single heart to save.

“Hollow, John,” Sherlock breathes into him, desperate: “They’re hollow and they have nothing, and they’re meant to be hollow except that they’re essential, they are necessary, they’re hollow only to be filled and they hold nothing,” and the sensation of John’s left ventricle swelling full unto release against the part of Sherlock’s lips is the most intoxicating, the most ephemeral brush with a divinity that exists only here, only in this, in _them_ , and Sherlock’s breath upon exhalation is thick with it, overcome: “They are _nothing_ if not for you.” 

There _is_ nothing, if not for John.

And Sherlock’s mouth does not abandon the evidence, the promise of John’s own heart as he leans in, supports John’s weight against his thighs as John himself shifts to compensate; as he leads John’s palm from the curve of his hip, traces up the aorta, a fluttering heart short of the arch: inferior; reaches to play John’s palm against the trembling just below his clavicle; superior—John’s eyes are fever bright, a forge for something stronger than Sherlock’s psyche, Sherlock’s soul: unthinkable, unbreakable.

 _His_.

Sherlock breathes, and his eyes slip closed against the way that they sting.

“They learnt your density, learnt the perfection of what you contain and everything less than you was deleted, everything less than you won’t suffice,” and it’s a law of gravity, the fathomless truth of it, and suddenly, there’s not enough force in the pulse of John’s blood to assuage the terror, the residue of that promise of loss and Sherlock falters, his knees tremble and they both slip, they both give way against the surface they’re pressed to, held against: John’s legs around him drop just in time to steady them, to ease them to the ground and Sherlock gasps at the impossibility, at the tenderness in John’s hands curling round to his veins once more, the fire in John’s eyes aiming to swallow him and burn them both until their ashes mingle and they’re inseparable, one amalgamation of all that flames could not reduce.

And Sherlock cannot blink, can do nothing but follow John’s touch, be lost in John’s gaze as his heart thrashes madly, as John’s hands meet above his sternum, folded heavy against the drumming, just slightly to the right: the endpoint, the atrium, where John within the veins pours forth and breathes, shapes: gives the heart there reason to contract at all.

“God,” John gasps, bows his head to meet the pounding. “You can’t,” he shakes his head, the hint of stubble catching against Sherlock’s skin, rough against the swell of his frantic pulse. 

“Sherlock, you,” John barely speaks for the way it’s all so strained, so _broken_ , and Sherlock cannot bear that he’s the cause, except he can, he must, there is nothing _else_ : “How _could_ you...”

“You have to understand, John,” Sherlock rasps in the intercostal spaces, between the beats of that unspeakably precious heart.

“I’ve _lost_ you.” 

And if Sherlock is hateful, if Sherlock forgets that his own heart somehow beats with John’s to some greater end, somehow lends John a life and a will and a joy that Sherlock cannot fathom: when Sherlock feels wretched, and forgets that John needs him just as deeply, just as wholly as John himself is needed in return, then Sherlock will remember. Sherlock will take the files in his hard drive and enter every code, empty every cache, and he will wallow in the way his world has been lightless before, but never soulless; the way his chest has cracked for pressure and for feeling, but never caved, not before John.

Not before _losing John_.

In his darkest moments, Sherlock will remember, and he reaches for John when his breath comes too thin, too useless and pallid and wrung until John suffuses through his pores, until John is everywhere, everything, and for all that he recalls, he is surrounded by what he knows in the now: John.

 _John_.

But the facts remain, much as they cut at him, leave the veins of him seeping until he goes cold: the needle, insidious; the train, a trick of fate. Sherlock knows what happens when he is bereft of John, of the orienting rhythm of him, the all-consuming warmth.

It does not bear thinking, let alone repeating. 

“Never truly,” John exhales, hot and wet and real against the quaking line of his carotid: “Never for long.”

“Enough,” Sherlock chokes around the weight of it, the press against his windpipe like the fist around his heart—shuddering, maddening, threatening to crush: “More than enough, John.”

And he can see it, when something crucial shifts in John’s gaze, when John not merely recognises but seems to feel, seems to gasp around the same venom of _loss_ that Sherlock is battling to control: he can see the spread of an understanding that reflects multitudes and speaks volumes as it leaches in the blood and pervades.

“You cannot know what that felt like, what that did,” Sherlock nearly moans it, because the memories make the pulsing of his blood feel fetid, shrill. 

“I could not,” Sherlock whispers, pulling John against him, murmuring into John’s neck as he presses them together, forceful enough to send them both reeling, horizontal, John’s chest, John’s weight, John’s _being_ encompassing Sherlock, pressing him down and reminding him of its persistence, its fragile continuation with every breath John heaves into Sherlock torso, against his skin: “I would not survive it again.”

“And you think I could?” John forces out, rough and low and filled with a hurt Sherlock feels, a blow to the solar plexus, nails against the epicardium, flaying myocytes as they gouge.

“Sherlock, you are _everything_ ,” John tells him, grates out with a feeling that strikes Sherlock to the bone, that shivers through him so as to send the fluid in the walls of his pericardium quivering with a force, with an arrhythmic oscillation that fights the half-wrecked thrashing of his atria, makes him feel faint. “You are gravity and oxygen and the blood and the marrow and every goddamned reason any heart sees fit to beat.”

“No,” Sherlock gasps, and it’s so close to a sob that he nearly crumbles for it. “No, John, you can’t—”

“I damn well _can_ , Sherlock Holmes,” John bites through clenched teeth, and the determination, the steel and the need in John’s eyes catches in the flow of Sherlock’s blood as he leans, as he kisses Sherlock hard exhales against his lips: “Watch me.”

And John’s motions are deft as rids them of what barriers remain; as his left hand guides Sherlock’s length to his entrance, and John’s right hand leads Sherlock’s palm to his chest as he lowers himself onto Sherlock’s cock, and Sherlock’s heart vibrates for the sensation of it, for the feeling of John’s body everywhere, _everywhere_. 

John sets a languid rhythm, earnest yet fluid, dragging Sherlock’s fingers high enough to kiss the pads each time he meets the barely restrained roll of Sherlock’s hips, and Sherlock’s needs it, loves it, melts against it yet with John’s lips against his hands he can’t feel it, the rapid pulse: it isn’t heavy enough, yet—it doesn’t press back against Sherlock’s hold. 

“More.”

And John, oh—John never falters, never so much as quirks a brow: Sherlock needs, _needs_ more.

John’s pace increases threefold, at least.

Sherlock whimpers, nearly comes for the give of it, the gift of this, of _John_.

“More, John,” Sherlock can’t help but plead, can’t help but beg, because the movement, the motion, it makes the beating faint, too distant, too far from Sherlock’s tactile certitude. “Please, more,” he gasps; “I need, I _need_ —”

And it’s only once John gives it, once John pulls off of him ever swifter, sinks around him ever fuller, harder, near-impossible until Sherlock can barely breathe: it’s only once _more_ feels unreachable that Sherlock gets a flash of clarity, that a sliver of frigid fear runs through him and his hand is at the hollow of John’s throat where there’s rapid fire surging beneath the surface, dizzying and dangerous and sheer.

Sherlock’s own heart stumbles, clenches, and he feels it as his eyes widen, as his throat tightens and his chest goes raw for what he’s done, what he’s asked, the lengths he’s pushed this man, this infinitely precious being whose very atria, whose trabeculae carneae and chordae tendineae and every pectinate muscle Sherlock would kill for, die for: he’s pushed this, he’s risked _this_ —

“No, no, don’t,” John pants, and Sherlock’s gaze is drawn away from the thrust of John’s pulse at the neck to the clear sheen of John’s eyes—eyes that read the hesitation, the terror, the desire to recede lest he break something, lest he push too far and lose.

Again.

But John’s hand is in his own, drawing his touch to the visceral swell and give, the lull and brace of that mighty conflagration, that unprecedented amalgam of chambers and vessels and valves and moving in perfect synchrony, too much, too swift, too _deep_ — 

“This is us, Sherlock,” John breathes, clenching around Sherlock’s shaft, laid bare to the press of Sherlock’s touch, lined wholly against Sherlock’s soul. “This is life, and this is warmth, this is real and this is _everything_.”

And Sherlock doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to pull away because he’s right, John’s right: this is the undying undulation of the universe at large, inside which all that persists with any meaning, any value, any worth or will or _sense_ —this is the rhythm of John’s being, the symphony of John’s flesh and blood and his heart, his _heart_ beneath Sherlock’s hand is a wonder, a marvel, a breathlessness undimmed.

“ _John_ ,” Sherlock gasps, overwhelmed and wrenched with it, trembling against its weight.

“And goddamnit, Sherlock,” John breathes, calm and intent as Sherlock can barely help but shake. “If it’s my heart you need to feel as a fact,” John starts, covering Sherlock’s hand at John’s chest before easing the touch, breaking the contact, and Sherlock whimpers, Sherlock tenses when the beat is gone but John is warm, John is tender, and he is still sheathed in John, can feel his heat from all angles, all sides and so he breathes.

He breathes, and lets John lace their fingers together, palm to knuckles: he lets John lead his open hand to Sherlock’s own heaving chest, pressed reverent, aching to his own wild heart. 

“If it’s the measure of the heart that you need so badly,” John murmurs, leans in and inhales, exhales against the stretch of Sherlock’s neck: “There it is.”

And Sherlock feels it, every trip and tremble of his own ventricular contractility, pounding and swelling and full, so fucking full when John pulls back just enough to meet his eyes, to tell him all the things words cannot touch, and Sherlock feels the prick of it, the sting of it in his eyes, the weight of it heavy and hard inside his throat, impossible.

Imperative.

“It’s,” John laughs, and it’s a wet sound, overflowing: “It’s absolutely mad, you know. It’s a selflessness that’s so fucking selfish,” and John’s head dips, pressing their hands together tighter when he leans to press his lips to Sherlock’s mouth, to breathe every gasp Sherlock gives into his body, to blur what lines remain between their selves: “So fucking gorgeous that when I think about it too much, I—”

John chokes, sobs into Sherlock’s mouth for the all-consuming enormity of this, of them: this wonder they’ve fallen into, given over to, that will never cease to astound.

John sobs into Sherlock’s mouth, and Sherlock catches, breathes in the sound until it loosens the feeling lodged in his own chest, his own throat, and lets it loose with a low moan, an ache that sears and soothes.

“It’s,” Sherlock gasps it, entirely consumed as he trembles, as he presses John’s frame to his own and traps their hands between them tight until he can feel the subtle hint of John’s pulse through the layers of skin and bone: “You’re—” 

“Breathe, darling,” John coaxes, soft and sweet and sure. “Breathe, please,” and he strokes Sherlock’s shoulders, Sherlock’s torso, his sides; rests now with his own palm placed above Sherlock’s keening heart. 

“Let us have this,” he whispers, pleads it. “Let us both have this.”

Sherlock breathes. Sherlock breathes, and loses himself in John’s eyes before he gets lost against in John’s body, and as John lowers onto him again, lets himself be filled by Sherlock’s length as it hardens, as Sherlock aches for John anew with every thrust, surrounded entirely by the beat of John’s heart through every part of his frame, every muscle and bone. As John makes them one body, one physical presence as much as they are perpetually a singular soul, Sherlock reaches, lays his hand upon John’s chest and feels, lets it take him over and propel him, sustain him—save the whole of him from ruin.

They both shake through the peak, and somehow it only intensifies, only grows more overwhelming in the descent. John’s arms snake around Sherlock’s waist as Sherlock curls around John from above and below, wrapping around his shoulders and twining their ankles together as his chest heaves, as he presses the open ring of his mouth in uncoordinated kisses across John’s face, John’s neck, John’s clavicle as John just breathes, breathes against Sherlock’s chest until they both settle, until their breathing evens, quiets despite the persistence of their heartbeats: the only thing strong enough to dare against the hush.

“I should have asked,” Sherlock eventually breaks the stasis, the gloriously-fraught still: “Are you, do you want,” he pauses, swallows, and settles in again to the steadiness of that beat: “Will you come with me?”

“No man can live without his heart,” John whispers, his breath, his lips buried in Sherlock’s sweat-slick curls. “I’ve learned to go wherever mine leads.”

“It leads for the fact of _you_ , and you alone,” Sherlock says with an absoluteness, with a certitude that cannot waver. “Without you, I would be...” 

“Never,” John exhales against him, folds him closer to his skin. “You’ll never be without me, because I am selfish, Sherlock,” and John kisses his head, his brow, the space behind his ear that betrays his still-trashing heart, sends a shiver down his spine. “I am selfish, and I will never allow myself to be without _you_.”

And John is steady, constant; his presence leaches the tension from the walls of Sherlock’s heart, the very cells of his blood with every soft breath, every moment of his touch.

“Would you have let me believe it, if I hadn’t known?” John’s voice is rough, his pulse sharper now, a touch too fast. “If I hadn’t figured it out, would you have left me to grieve?”

It takes all that he has, all that he knows himself to possess and more from mere conjecture: it takes an effort herculean and altogether painful to turn, to pull back: to resist the tangible, evident strength of John’s beating heart in order to face him, to stare him straight on and gape at him with nothing short of horror.

“How could you,” Sherlock hears it, sees it resonate in John’s gaze: the agony, the terrible disbelief, the pain of the very concept as Sherlock gives impossibility a voice: “How could you even think that I am _capable_ of leaving you?”

“That I’d want to, that I’d choose to,” Sherlock shakes his head, drops his eyes, and his chest hurts, the pressure making the expansion of his lungs a difficulty, rendering his breaths thin, short.

“I should,” Sherlock admits, softly. “I should tell you yes, that I would leave, for your safety,” he reaches for John’s cheek and relishes, gasps and holds when John leans into the cup of his palm: “To keep you...”

The torrential force of Sherlock's pulse at his throat catches, twists against his words. 

“But John,” Sherlock exhales, thready and breaking, lanced through with the weight of swallowed sobs, the hysteric thrashing of his blood: “I can do nothing to protect you, without you.” 

Sherlock gropes, clings for John’s hand and draws it to his chest, filled with intent.

“I told you,” he whispers, meets John’s eyes and begs to be seen: “Hollow, save for you.”

John stare at him, eyes glazed with something so deep as to drown in it, and Sherlock would.

Oh, god: Sherlock would _gladly_.

“Anything but,” John exhales, soft as he splays his hand across the centre of Sherlock’s chest, as he leans, kisses Sherlock’s open mouth with a tenderness that fibrillates through the heart his hand encompasses, the heart he’s always held.

“You’d have left me empty, though, just the same,” John breathes against Sherlock’s lips, his own trembling as he exhales the truth of it: “Broken.”

“Never,” Sherlock shakes his head, catches John’s jaw and breathes there, stays there, relishes the facial pulse. “You’re the strongest man I’ve ever known,” and Sherlock leads John’s hand now from his chest to John’s own: “The strongest heart.”

“With you,” John dips his chin and catches the tips of Sherlock’s fingers with his lips. “With you, I am those things. With you, I am strong. In belonging to you,” John brings his free hand to cover Sherlock’s where it covers his own, pressing so that the profound resonance of John Watson encompasses, envelopes from all sides. 

“You made this stronger than I...” John’s voice breaks, and his heart pounds, thrums hard, and love is a word, a concept that could never aspire to convey even a fragment of what this is, of what bursts between his ribs and floods his body, his mind, the self of him entire with a warmth and a need that knows no definition.

“John,” Sherlock pants again John’s neck, desperate, utterly spent as John clings to him with the same strength which Sherlock clings in turn, easing them prone, bodies flush from lips to shins. “ _John_.”

“Sleep now, love,” John breathes, hoarse but true, and it’s a balm, it always is. “There’s nothing tomorrow can bring that can touch us,” he murmurs as Sherlock tucks into the hollow of his throat, as their hands against John’s chest are caught now against Sherlock’s, too; “that can shake _this_.”

Sherlock’s breath is wet, tremulous as he exhales against John’s skin, against the hum of John’s blood as he threads their fingers together and revels in the press of John’s mouth to the top of his head.

“I believe that,” John says with feeling, with the conviction of utter truth: “I believe that with all my heart.”

And John’s heart is Sherlock’s own, John’s certitude matched in the will of his very soul. And John—John against him, around him, lungs filling, blood pumping, touch warm, _here_ : John who _believes_ with the fullness of that infinite heart, and that, _that_ —

Sherlock kisses John’s skin, tries to press everything he feels, everything he is the very flow of John’s blood, because John is all-embracing, sempiternal, and the certainty of this immaculate, illimitable heart is everything Sherlock could ever ask.

Could ever need.


End file.
